Twenty-five years ago Batson v. Kentucky held that equal protection is violated when attorneys exercise racially discriminatory peremptory jury challenges and supply pretextual explanations for their strikes. Findings of Batson violations are tantamount to rulings that attorneys have discriminated and lied. Not only do Batson findings potentially subject violators to sanction under standards of professional ethics, but they also amount to imputations of personal fault or “blame” for socially undesirable conduct. This article explores, from both practical and theoretical perspectives, the problem of the attribution of personal fault to attorneys that is inherent in a finding of a Batson violation. On the practical side, although the blaming effect seems inevitable, it may prove counterproductive to Batson‘s goal of eliminating racial discrimination in jury selection. In terms of constitutional theory, Batson enforces the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee, and blame appears to be an inexorable consequence of either of the two dominant theories of equal protection analysis: “anticlassification” theory, used by the Supreme Court’s majority, and “antisubordination” theory, urged by Supreme Court dissenters and many academics. Assuming blame is unavoidable under either current theory, and yet that it interferes with rooting out discrimination, this Essay explores a third possible alternative view of equal protection — “antibalkanization” — which might resolve the problem of discriminatory peremptory strikes without necessarily implicating personal blame.

OSLO — Convicted of killing 77 people in a horrific bombing and shooting attack in July last year, the Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik was sentenced on Friday to 21 years in prison — fewer than four months per victim — ending a case that thoroughly tested this gentle country’s collective commitment to values like tolerance, nonviolence and merciful justice.

Mr. Breivik, lawyers say, will live in a prison outside Oslo in a three-cell suite of rooms equipped with exercise equipment, a television and a laptop, albeit one without Internet access. If he is not considered a threat after serving his sentence, the maximum available under Norwegian law, he will be eligible for release in 2033, at the age of 53.

However, his demeanor, testimony and declaration that he would have liked to kill more people helped convince the judges that, however lenient the sentence seems, Mr. Breivik is unlikely ever to be released from prison. He could be kept there indefinitely by judges adding a succession of five-year extensions to his sentence.

The American
criminal justice system is under tremendous pressures, increasingly collapsing
under its heavy weight, thus requiring inevitable change. One notable feature
responsible for this broken system is over-criminalization: the scope of
criminal law is constantly expanding, making individuals liable to conviction
and punishment for an ever-wider range of behaviors. One area where
over-criminalization is most notable concerns victimless crimes, namely,
individuals who engage in consensual conducts which inflict only harm on
themselves but not on third parties, such as prostitution, pornography,
sadomasochism, gambling, and most notably, drug crimes.

In two 2012
opinions, Commonwealth v. Bedford and State v. Williams, courts rejected appeals
by convicted homicide defendants sentenced to life imprisonment. Each defendant
claimed that his victim was the first aggressor, prompting the prosecution to
present character evidence concerning the victim’s character for peacefulness
even though neither defendant claimed that his victim was generally a violent
person. The prosecution in both cases presented this character evidence under a
state counterpart to Federal Rule of Evidence 404(a)(2)(C), a frequently applied
exception to the general rule that propensity character evidence is
inadmissible.

Many see the introduction of neuroscience into law as necessarily leading to reduced culpability, mitigation, and the ratcheting down of incarceration rates. But such possibilities may not materialize if prosecutors stay ahead of the brain science curve. This commentary provides a brief introduction to neurolaw, and highlights several key features of neuroscientific evidence that are relevant to prosecutors' work.

I propose strategies by which prosecutors may respond to the introduction of neuroscientific evidence by the defense.

[T]he majority’s extension of the good-faith exception strikes me as unwarranted and unfortunate. The Fourth Circuit reduces the exclusionary rule to a general test of individual culpability of the officers involved. Of course, there isn’t such evidence: Personal culpability is mostly about what the officers were subjectively thinking, and an officer’s subjective intent is irrelevant under Whren v. United States and difficult to establish even if it is considered relevant. In effect, there is little chance of exclusion without proof of state of mind, but the defense can’t get proof of state of mind so it doesn’t have much of a chance at suppression.

A judge for the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York [official website] ruled Tuesday that a poker game operator could not be tried under a federal gambling law essentially because poker is more a game of skill than a game of chance. Judge Jack Weinstein wrote in a 120-page judgment [order, PDF] that the Illegal Gambling Business Act (IGBA) [Cornell LII materials] does not apply to the poker room operated in a warehouse owned by Lawrence Dicristina, from which Dicristina took five percent of each night's pot for covering costs and for his own profit. New York law recognizes poker as a form of gambling [NYT report], but no federal court had ever ruled on the subject.

Public Defenders
fall short of their obligations to clients every day for reasons beyond their
control. However, constantly failing to be able to achieve justice for those
they are charged with serving can drive even the most committed public defenders
from the profession. This article reframes the definition of success for public
defenders and seeks to inspire those who do the work to continue fighting to
make Gideon's promise a reality.

This is a line-by line analysis of the second verse of “99 Problems,” by Jay-Z, from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor. It’s intended as a resource for law students and teachers, and for anyone who’s interested in what pop culture gets right about criminal justice, and what it gets wrong.

People v. Rizzo, 158 N.E. 888 (N.Y. 1927), the case of a bunch of incompetent would-be robbers who never quite found their victim, is one of the great icons of attempt law and of criminal law generally. The prosecutor had plenty of evidence that the defendants were trying to find a payroll agent who was to deliver wages at a construction site, but they spent hours driving around the Bronx in futile pursuit of their prey, and spotted by the police, were arrested just before the intended victim showed up. In reversing the conviction for attempted robbery, the New York Court of Appeals held that the conduct of the defendants fell short of the line that divides preparation from attempt — although it also offered the police perhaps unwelcome congratulations for their vigilance. This chapter in Criminal Law Stories (Donna Coker & Robert Weisberg, eds., 2012), recounts the background of the Rizzo case and narrates the trial itself, which, amid a fair amount of comedy, offers a useful picture of late 1920s law enforcement and trial practice.

Meghan J. Ryan (Southern Methodist University - Dedman School of Law) has posted Death and Rehabilitation on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

While rehabilitation is reemerging as an important penological goal, the Supreme Court is eroding the long-revered divide between capital and non-capital sentences. This raises the question of whether and how rehabilitation applies in the capital context. Courts and scholars have long concluded that it does not — that death is completely irrelevant to rehabilitation. Yet, historically, the death penalty in this country has been imposed in large part to induce the rehabilitation of offenders’ characters. Additionally, there are tales of the worst offenders transforming their characters when they are facing death, and several legal doctrines are based on the idea that death spurs rehabilitation.

In this article, we revisit our 1995 analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s death penalty jurisprudence (Sober Second Thoughts: Reflections on Two Decades of Constitutional Regulation of Capital Punishment, 109 Harv. L. Rev. 357) in light of the steep decline in death sentences and executions over the past decade. Our consideration of the causes of this precipitous and unexpected turnaround leads us to the surprising conclusion that the same regulatory reforms of the modern (post-1976) era that we earlier described as legitimating and entrenching the practice of capital punishment have also contributed to its recent destabilization. We contrast the effects of the death penalty reforms of prior generations – such as narrowing the scope of death-eligible crimes, making death sentences discretionary rather than mandatory, privatizing and centralizing executions, and improving execution methods – with the reforms of the modern era of constitutional regulation. The reforms of the modern era have vastly increased the regulation and cost of the death penalty, required the professionalization of the capital litigation bar, led to lengthy periods of time between sentencing and execution, increased the focus on mitigation in capital trials, and contributed to the proliferation of life-without-parole as an alternative to the death sentence. We argue that the current regime represents a fundamental break with past modes of regulating capital punishment in ways that render the current American death penalty unstable, indeed precarious. We explore the implications of these insights for two broader debates – the first about the relationship between reform and abolition, and the second about the causes of American “exceptionalism” with regard to capital punishment.

For the past eighty years, the entrapment doctrine has provided a legal defense for those facing federal prosecution, but only for those defendants lacking criminal “predisposition” prior to the government’s inducement. The peculiar contours of this doctrine have generated significant/academic debate, yet this scholarship has failed to explain why the entrapment doctrine developed as it did in the first instance. This Article addresses this gap by examining competing views on criminality and punishment in America during the doctrine’s emergence, highlighting the significant (though largely forgotten) impact of positivist criminology on the early twentieth-century legal imagination. Though positivism has long since been discredited as a criminological school, positivist theory helped shape the entrapment doctrine, and this intellectual context helps explain several features of the modern defense that have puzzled legal scholars. Unraveling these forgotten theoretical underpinnings thus provides a novel historical perspective on the modern doctrine’s formation, but it also offers a path forward for entrapment law today.

This Note discusses the enactment of 28 U.S.C. § 2255 and the fundamental changes the AEDPA brought to that statute. It then considers attempts by the U.S. Courts of Appeal to define the term “inadequate or ineffective,” the operative language of the savings clause. This Note argues that all of the tests adopted by the Courts of Appeal are fundamentally flawed when considered against all of the interests relevant to the statutory interpretation of § 2255. Finally,it proposes a new test to govern the operation of the savings clause that avoids the pitfalls of the tests adopted by the Courts of Appeal.

Also, even if you have the right to a public defender, you should know that in some jurisdictions, a public defender is not necessarily free. States are increasingly imposing fees on indigent criminal defendants, including fees for the public defender. Sometimes defendants have to pay the fees even if they're acquitted of the charges.

The Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination protects a person from being compelled to provide a testimonial communication that is incriminating in nature. In a number of cases starting to wind through state and federal courts, the government has sought to compel suspects and defendants to provide passwords and encryption keys despite claims of Fifth Amendment Privilege by witnesses and suspects. For example, in a Colorado case, the government sought to compel the defendant to enter a password into a laptop or otherwise provide access to encrypted data stored on her computer. The government apparently believed that the encrypted computer files contained evidence of fraudulent real estate transactions.

Most people convicted of felonies are not sentenced to prison; a majority receive straight probation, or probation with a jail term. However, this hardly means that the conviction is inconsequential. Tens of thousands of federal, state, and local laws, regulations, and ordinances restrict the civil rights, employment, eligibility for public benefits, residence and other aspects of the status of convicted persons.

Accordingly, for many, the most serious and long-lasting effects of conviction flow from the status of being convicted and the concomitant lifetime subjection to collateral consequences. However, courts generally treat collateral consequences as non-punitive civil regulations, and therefore not subject to constitutional limitations on criminal punishment.

As a part of the ANtional Association of Crminal Defense Lawyers perspectives on Gideon v. Wainwright's 50th anniversary, this article examines the promise of effective assistance of defense counsel, and how low that standard is and its deleterious effects on justice.

The general public has been bewildered by the magnitude of sex abuse cases and the widespread failure by pillars of the community to notify appropriate authorities. The crime of sexually abusing children is punishable in all jurisdictions and this article examines the duty to report suspected cases by individuals in positions of trust over young people, such as in the church or university sports. The Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) defines child maltreatment as an act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caregiver that results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse, or exploitation, and establishes minimum federal standards. Each state has its own definitions of maltreatment and every state identifies persons who are required to report child abuse. As such, state law is highly variable in defining who has a mandatory duty to report, and clergy and other individuals in close supervision of children (e.g., athletic coaches, scout leaders, volunteers in religious programs, and university officials) may necessarily hold such duty.